It’s almost 2026! Boy, 2025 was quite a year, wasn’t it? There’s time for one more book review, and I can’t think of a more appropriate choice than a T. Kingfisher story about a young woman who finally decides she’s had enough of the crap that life has dumped on her, and nopes out to another time zone.
The first thing you should probably keep in mind when starting this book is that roadrunners, actual roadrunners and not the Looney Tunes version, can be scary. T. Kingfisher describes them as “somewhere between a velociraptor and a chicken with a shiv.” Too fast to see humans as a threat, have been known to attack zoo keepers and murder small farm animals, their favorite food is live rattlesnakes. So when you find that Selena, the main character of the book, is intimidated by them, you should know that it’s because they’re actually intimidating creatures, and not just Selena being afraid.
Because unfortunately Selena is afraid of a lot.
Introverts like myself will instantly recognize the need to have scripts ready for human interactions so you can spend the minimum amount of time afterwards kicking yourself for coming across as a weird idiot. Serena however takes this to extremes, and for damn good reason. Cursed with a mother who was hyper-focused on Serena not being embarrassing in public (“embarrassing” here meaning “doing anything at any time that alerts any other person to her existence”), Serena is constantly apologizing for being incapable of handling anything on her own or acting like a normal grownup. And then she has the bad luck to fall into a relationship with a loving boyfriend who every day kindly, gently, and patiently…reminds her that she’s incapable of handling anything on her own or acting like a normal grownup.
It’s no wonder that Serena jumps at the chance to take the last of her savings and flee, hoping to find some kind of refuge with a distant aunt living in the tiny desert community of Quartz Creek. She arrives dusty and tired with just twenty-seven dollars left to her name, her beloved dog Copper at her side, to find that her aunt is gone and she’s now has no way of buying a ticket back “home”. So it’s lucky that no one has claimed her aunt’s house, and no one in town seems to think it will be a problem if she just…stayed there.
Jenny, the mayor and the postmistress and the fire marshal and the chief of police, smiled at her and said, “It’s called Jackrabbit Hole House. You can’t miss it.”
T. Kingfisher apparently wrote this while she was in the process of moving from North Carolina to New Mexico, and the love she has for the high desert landscape comes shining through in her descriptions of the turquoise sky, the cicadas buzzing like a soundtrack for the heat coming off the road, or the determined plants and animals that find a way to cling to life and even thrive in an environment that makes humans wilt.
There are other things in the desert that aren’t quite so easy to understand, or as friendly. Serena’s aunt had secrets, and secret friends, and there’s a presence in the desert that seems to think Serena owes something. Serena already worries that she’s upset someone in the usual way she has of Not Knowing The Rules, but she has to call in help when a roadrunner tries to kick her door down, followed a brilliantly “Yikes!” scene when she’s all alone in her aunt’s house and gets a visitor that’s possibly not human.
Someone was watching her across the road. Someone, or something.
The people Serena goes to for help are probably my favorite part of the book. T. Kingfisher excels at creating lovely, believable allies for her characters, and the town of Quartz Creek is full of them. It’s magical, and I hope a reflection of the life the author has found in New Mexico, how people come together in mundane ways like church suppers, and gardening tips, and free eggs. Serena’s nearest neighbor is a sassy elderly woman who brings over cocktails, the townspeople include her in evenings of folk-art crafts, and the local Catholic priest subscribes to the most gentle and empathic version of Christianity I’ve ever seen. And they all have at least a little experience with desert gods and thin-places in the universe. I loved the good-natured bickering, and the fact that reactions to something supernatural are less “wtf” and more “again?”
Father Aguirre filled the doorway. He looked from Selena to Copper to Grandma Billy.
“Staging a religious coup?” he asked mildly.
“Not today,” said Grandma. “Got troubles. Need you to bless my gun.”
Father Aguirre sighed. “Let me get the oil…”
It’s tempting to think that this experience transforms Serena. But when you really think about it, Serena was always the person she is by the end of the book. She’s devoted to her dog (I lost count of the number of times she gets some kind of windfall and her first thought was “oh good, I can get more food for Copper”), she’s a capable worker who’s able to handle more stress and responsibility than most, and she frets about saying the wrong thing or being too dependent on people’s charity because she puts so much importance on good people being treated they way they deserve. It’s not so much that she becomes a stronger person by the end, it’s that somewhere, amongst the squash gods and church suppers and new friends and several flavors of Bad Relationships, she actually realizes the universe won’t strike her down for realizing how capable she already is.